Wednesday, March 9, 2011

If you hang around long enough...

My friends are always pointing out that I complain about my job too much. In reality, I like the job, albeit, it is a bit more frustrating than it has to be some of the time. However, this is a feel good story about my job.

I have been at my job for 15 years performing various duties. One of my jobs here is to ride heard over volunteer committees who review state policies. This is a state mandated ‘safety net’ and they are referred to as Review Boards. Each Board is made up of five volunteers that donate one day a month to this task. One of my jobs is to coordinate and facilitate these monthly Boards.

I have facilitated in excess of 1,500 of these Boards since signing on here in 1997. Some Boards are easy, others are rather contentious.

After 14 years of doing this, none of the volunteer Review Board members has ever complained about my ability to do my job. That is, until last year.

I was assigned a Review Board comprised of older women that flat out just did not like me. For some unknown reason, I was the lone man sitting in the ladies room and I was not welcome.

The longest serving volunteer of the Review Board proceeded to fire off a series of e-mails to my supervisor complaining about my ability to conduct the Review Board in the way she was accustomed. None of the previous 1,499 Review Boards had a problem, but this Board did.

I sucked it up and carried on because I knew that this is how life goes sometimes. If you walk through the garden long enough, you are bound to get something smelly stuck on the bottom of your shoe. This Board is the fertilizer among all the flowers.

The Board and I sort of reached a truce for the last several months and carried on with our job duties in the reviews as best we could. Then, last month, due to some staffing changes, I had to cover a co-workers Board and she was assigned to cover my happy-happy-joy-joy Board.

I emailed the Board members that I wouldn’t be facilitating the Board for the coming month and my co-worker would be there in my place. Several of the Board members responded via email and thanked me for the update and provided me some scheduling updates for the Review Board in April. However, the long-serving volunteer replied to “all’ of the people on the cc-list (of which I was also attached) with the following response:

“Good news, guys. Bruce won't be facilitating the March review--he's covering for CXXXXX SXXXXX, who resigned. AXXXXX will be our facilitator!”

Just to make sure that I wasn’t reading this the wrong way, I showed the email to several of my fellow co-workers and manager. They all agreed. There is unprofessional, and then there is REALLY unprofessional.

I don’t think I have to worry about any more complaints from this Board. They might make them, but at this point, I don’t think anyone is going to pay attention to them.

This e-mail, really made my day. I couldn’t stop laughing at it for about 30 minutes.